When I first started this project, I did so hoping it would become a collaborative space. I wanted to provide a platform to discuss the difficult questions we all say we need to talk about but don’t necessarily have the opportunity to do so. While I have been the main contributor for some time now, collaboration is still the goal.

In this spirit, I wanted to return to the original questions posed to stimulate discussion. I realized what I was asking was rather intense, as it was forcing us to dig deeper than it often feels comfortable to do. Nevertheless, several people responded and shared a little piece of themselves they probably aren’t used to sharing.

I am quite thankful for this, for I benefited greatly from this brief look into the depths of those around me. Shortly after the buzz died down, some of those who responded reached out and told me they too enjoyed the exercise, since it gave them a new outlet for self-reflection and expression. Unfortunately, though, the dialogue stopped there.

This was truthfully quite discouraging; I believe I set my expectations too high. However, looking back, I realize it was quite unfair of me to ask people to open themselves up to the world without being willing to do the same myself. My intention behind this was to show how this project is not solely about me, which is often assumed to be the case when someone starts a blog.

Now, several months later, I’ve had a change of heart, and I thought I would share my answers to try and get a conversation going. In many ways, these thoughts and self-reflections are what motivated me to ask these questions in the first place. I hope you find them interesting.

Anyone who has had the opportunity to go to a training session or professional development event will know that the power of change and the ability to adapt is one of the most important skills we can learn. We live in an incredibly complex world that seems to be mercilessly dragging us along as it changes on a dime and constantly presents us with more challenges to overcome. It is overwhelming to say the least, but we all manage the anxiety that this situation brings knowing that we as people are incredibly smart and capable of adapting to any situation.

This gives us the strength to confront the world and provides us with the comfort of knowing that we will be all right. But in order to make use of this incredible ability to adapt we must do one thing above all else: we must understand, as best we can, the world around us. We must know the problems we are facing so we can determine the best solutions to ensure the continuation of mankind and the safety and security of generations to come.

But I would like to present a new perspective, one that points out how this type of thinking might just be what is getting in the way of our efforts to truly make this world a better place. This idea rests on one key concept:

We cannot understand the world around us.

It is far too complex, interconnected, multilayered and just plain old too big to possibly be able to understand it. There are too many of us thinking and doing too many different things and this makes any effort to comprehend it fall short and leaves us scratching our heads when plans don’t work out as we expected. This presents a complicated situation, because how can we possibly hope to inflict change on something we cannot hope to ever understand?